Tag Archives: Henry Scott Holland

I am deeply gratified by your response to A Swift Current, both by comments posted here and those shared with me privately. Your thoughts have encouraged, inspired and challenged me, and I thank you.

I would like to share two responses to the last post, I Call Your Name.

The first is from a friend who lost her husband four years ago. She mentions him in our conversations without hesitation or pause. But she recently confided that some friends appear uncomfortable when when she says his name.

And so she edits herself, to put others at ease.

Perhaps her husband lovingly anticipated her dilemma. Before he died, he asked her to send the quotation below to their many friends. Written in 1910, it is an excerpt from a sermon by the Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Henry Scott Holland:

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word it always was.

Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow on it.

My friend’s husband concluded his final message with these words:

And now I bid you a most heartfelt farewell.

And my sister reminded me of a serigraph by the artist Corita Kent, G O greatest show of worth.This memory is particularly poignant. Shortly after our Father died, our Mother started work at Corita’s gallery in North Hollywood. For the next twenty years, she spent her days surrounded by Corita’s jubilant art (www.corita.org).

Part of the 1968 series Damn Everything But the Circus, Corita’s print incorporates a quote from The Last Unicorn by P. G. Beagle: